El piñatero/ The Piñata Maker

I love piñatas! They hold a special place in my heart and memories. When I was seven years old, my grandfather brought back from Mexico a beautiful, traditional piñata called piñata de picos. It was gorgeous a shard and I still have mine all these years later.

El piñatero/ The Piñata Maker with tons of brightly colored paper and streaming tassles on each cone. I remember being so excited when it was time to break it. We sang the piñata song, dale dale dale... The best part of all was when one of my cousins broke it and we found it was made of clay. Each of us children kept is a fantastic little photo journal about a piñata maker. There are full color photos of the process of making piñatas. It is the story of Tio Rico, a traditional piñata maker. His pinatas are exquisite, especially the Swan which is elegant and feels almost alive. There are pages dedicated to my favorite, the piñata de picos, my birthday piña. I was thrilled to find this amazing little book dedicated to an almost lost art. No Spongebob piñatas or tacky Ninja or tacky Ninja turtles made of cheap paper and plastic in this book.

It's a treasure and I share it with you on in the hopes of reviving the art so that our children can be as enchanted as I was on my seventh birthday.

The Monstrous Memoirs of a Mighty McFearless

The Monstrous Memoirs of a Mighty McFearless










Author: Ahmet Zappa
Monster Designs and Illustrations: Ahmet Zappa
Photo Illustrations and Sculptures: Clay Sparks
Photos of Main Characters: Brian Bowen-Smith
Costunme Design: Paris Libby
Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0375832874


Minerva and Max McFearless have just found out that their father is a Monsterminator and that they come from a long line of legendary monster killers. The book opens with Minerva, Max and their father all trapped in an iron birdcage over a bottomless pit of fiery molten lava. How’s that for exciting?

The book follows Max and Minerva as they set out to rescue their father from an evil demon. They, along with Ms. Monstranomicon, a monster hunting manual that is itself a monster set off have many wild, dangerous and just plain weird adventures as they are being chased by the evil minions of the vile Zarmaglorg.

Even though this book is meant for older children, I’d say in the 9-13 age range, my three year old granddaughter is obsessed with it. Every time she comes over, she heads right for the shelf and pulls it and says “read it Grammy, read my monster book”. What is it about kids loving to be scared? We never really read it, she’s three and has the attention span of a gnat but we spend lots of time looking at the doodles, drawings and photos that are just fun and wonderful. She loves the tongue twisters too. I’ve read the first paragraph of the book at least 100 times and she always wants to hear it again. It sounds funny and she loves that. Kids love funny sounding nonsense and this book is filled with paragraphs that make them laugh.

I finally took the time (she’s not here) to read the book for myself all the way though and I have to say that I wasn’t disappointed. This book is highly entertaining and just plain fun. There are some very creepy parts that I don’t recommend for smaller children, but if they are like my granddaughter, they won’t want the whole book read anyway. Give them bits and pieces and look over the drawings and you’re guaranteed to have a ripping good time.

One thing I loved about the book was the weird recipes in the book like Soldier Slimmers and a Pajama loaf telescope. They’re fun and inventive and just gross. Boys will love it. There’s a castle called Doominstinkinfart which sends my granddaughter off into peals of laughter every single time I say it. Kids like gross, kids like silly. This book is all that and more.

The photos and illustrations are fun as well and the doodles throughout the pages bring interest and a sense of the bizarre and dark to the pages. There are bugs aplenty as are photos of the protagonists, with Ahmet Zappa himself playing the father. The sepia tones of the photos give the book a feel of something old, dusty and scary. Think old black and white monster movie. It’s all fun and thoroughly engaging.

It’s a zany, gross and amusing romp of a read and I recommend it for the older ones but you, like me can modify it for the little ones.

Las Soldaderas

Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution by Elena Poniatowska
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press http://www.cincopuntos.com/
ISBN: 1-933693-04-5

Originally published in Mexico as Las Soldaderas, a coedition of Ediciones ERA and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, © copyright 1999


Anyone who knows me even just a bit knows that Elena Poniatowska is my favorite author and hero. She, along with Eduardo Galeano have opened my eyes over the years and have given me the strength to fight for indigenous rights, immigrant rights, and the lifelong battle to regain and preserve our lost traditions and culture. Her writings on the Mexico earthquake, Nothing, Nobody and on the 1968 massacre of unarmed student protestors at Tlateloco, Massacre in Mexico moved me greatly, changed how I viewed the world, my Chicanismo, put a fire in my soul and were my first introduction to her work. Those books made me a lifelong fan and avid reader of anything she writes. Imagine how excited I was to find this little book through Cinco Puntos Press!

The soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution have always fascinated me. There are stories in my family of them and I’ve always wanted to know more. Elizabeth Salas, in her excellent book Soldaderas in the Mexican Military fed some of my thirst for knowledge of these extraordinary women as did Ms. Poniatowska’s Hasta No Verte, Jesus Mio her biographical book about the experiences of an actual soldadera in the revolution. Still, I found myself wanting to know even more. I have dreams of the soldaderas, they want more, they want their stories to be out there, to be told. This book is one of the answers to them.

Ponitowska writes, “Without the soldaderas, there is no Mexican Revolution – they kept it alive and fertile like the earth.”

I believe her. Her narrative of the amazing contributions and tribulations of these valiant women really give you the feel of what it was like to march hungry, search a battlefield for your man, to really suffer as they did, to be fierce and indominiatble. I stand amazed at how much they did, how strong they were and how little they were valued by most people.



This little book is crammed with photos from the incredible collection of Agustin Victor Casasola in the Fototeca Nacional of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico. The incredible photos of the time give voice and face to these women. There are tenderness, anger, rage, sadness, determination, weariness, happiness, romance and excitement. There are young women with rifles, holding baskets of food, setting up camps. These women were EVERYWHERE in that revolution on all of the fighting sides.

I learned of Nellie Campobello, the only female novelist of the Revolution who was also a soldadera and was amazed that I had never heard of her. There are a lot of little details like that in the book, little bits of information that are tremendous in what light they give to the darkness of knowledge I have about them. Finding out about Nellie has me on a quest to find out more, to dig deeper, to go to Mexico and dig up her writings. I want to see for myself, read for myself a soldadera’s memories.

I could go on for days about this important little book, but I won’t. Run over to Cinco Puntos or your local independent bookstore like Tia Chucha’s or Imix and buy it now. You NEED this book. The Soldaderas need you to know them.